2 Oct 2026 – 10 Jan 2027
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries, Floor 3
The first solo exhibition in Europe of the celebrated New York-based painter Salman Toor.
The exhibition focuses on Salman Toor’s exploration of human interactions and the desire and struggle to experience a sense of belonging, both culturally and emotionally. The exhibition will bring together around 20 of the artist’s most iconic, thought-provoking and yet humorous paintings that represent people in shared moments of friendship and love, as well as experiencing solitude and alienation.
The characters that populate Toor’s painting are fictional but rooted in personal experiences and memories. Toor says that his paintings ‘depict queer and immigrant lives that straddle different cultures and inhabit the tension between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement. What it means to find a community, but also the daily costs associated with visibility.’
Born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1983, Toor trained in the United States. He currently lives and works in New York. He has had major exhibitions internationally, including his acclaimed first institutional solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2020-21). More recently, he participated in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2024). The Courtauld’s exhibition will be Toor’s first solo museum show in Europe.
Toor’s work is rooted in a deep engagement with the tradition of painting, and The Courtauld Gallery is one of the museums he most admires. One of the principal works in the exhibition, The Bar on East 13th (2019), revisits The Courtauld’s celebrated painting by Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882).
The exhibition will be accompanied by a display of Toor’s drawings in the Gilbert & Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery. Showcasing Toor’s mastery of drawing and the way it informs his practice as a painter, the display will include Fag Puddle in Vitrine (2021), acquired by The Courtauld in 2024
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